With more electronic devices relying on battery power, power consumption is becoming a more important criterion in the design of electronic devices and peripheral devices that connect to electronic devices. One area that consumes power in electronic devices is communication controllers, such as a Universal Serial Bus (USB), serial, or parallel communication controller. These controllers may require peripheral devices to respond repeatedly to polling from a host device. In some instances, an entire device controller on a peripheral device may be powered simply to respond to polling from a host device.
A conventional technique to reduce power consumption in devices, such as peripheral device controllers, is clock gating. In this technique, the clock to the individual elements in a peripheral device controller is stopped. This reduces the dynamic power, which is the power dissipated by circuits when the circuits are switching and active. However, with device controllers being designed with smaller technologies, such as 90 nm technologies and smaller, leakage power, the power dissipated by circuits when the circuits are inactive or not switching, may result in more power dissipation than dynamic power dissipation.